People keep asking me ``When is Linux going to be ready for the
commercial market''. I guess the first thing to discuss is
what is meant by "commercial" in this context.

Some CD-ROM vendors have put the word "commercial" in their name, only
to have the technical people think their product is good only for use by
banks and insurance companies. Other people look at their product with
disdain and say that ``Linux is not commercial quality'', because
it is missing some feature they need, or they feel it is unstable (usually
without ever trying it even one time).

To me, the word ``commercial'' has lost as much meaning in the marketplace
as some of the other buzzwords:

``Open'' vs ``Proprietary'' (People are now saying UNIX is ``Proprietary'')

``Workstation'' vs ``PC'' (What is a workstation, anyway?)

In the old days of computing the commercial market was banks, insurance
companies and business-oriented facilities where the use of COBOL or RPG
was the mainstream. The technical market was scientific, engineering
and manufacturing where FORTRAN and assembly language was used.
Somewhere along the way the term ``commercial'' seems to have gotten
twisted around to mean ``ready for the mass market'', versus ``ready for
hackers''.

For the purpose of this article I will take the second meaning, and
address whether I think Linux is ready for commercial purposes rather
than the hobbyist and hacker market, and ready for the mass market
rather than limited markets.

For those of you who hate reading long articles, or who are short on
time, let me give you my conclusion right now. Then you can go out and
drink beer or other fun activities:

``Yes, Linux is ready for the commercial market...in some cases''.

In order for an operating system to be ready for the mass market it must
have several attributes:

have lots of applications

be relatively easy to install

have lots of applications

be relatively easy to maintain

have lots of applications

be relatively easy to use

have lots of applications

not crash (much)

have lots of applications

be economical

have lots of applications

But you can eliminate all of these considerations in today's mass market
if only one thing is true:

You have lots of applications.

after all, there would not be 170,000,000 DOS systems in the world if
any of the others had to be true.

I almost added that is has to be economical, but history has actually
proven me wrong on that. If people added up the total cost of
ownership, then Apple would certainly have won over the PC. But people
ignore the human costs of someone else (or even themselves) beating
their head against the wall trying to get something to work, or the
system crashing repeatedly, or the fact that the one keystroke they can
hit the easiest (through practice) is

<CTRL><ALT><DEL>

In the old days people were content to spend several hundreds of dollars
on a simple ASCII text editor, or deal with a simple spreadsheet. And
it took an act of mangement to get them, with lots of Purchase Orders.
Today, they want multi-media integrated with their operating system, and
have all the applications available that their neighbor (or boss, or
compatriot) has available on their system. And they want to get these
applications easily, certainly no harder than to call up on the phone to
order them through a catalog, or go down to their corner store to get
them.

Now what causes this plethora of applications for an operating system?
Ease of programming? Good software development tools? Features inside
the operating system? Stability of the interfaces over time?

The answer is ``none of these''. While all these attributes may help
convince an application developer to port, the one overriding issue is
volume of the operating system platform. Again, if MSDOS were compared
to MacOS, or even to UNIX and volume were not taken into account, we
know which two operating systems would have the most applications, and
they would not be from Microsoft.

While it is true that several Linux vendors are working on getting these
applications for the mass market (read this " your mother and father"),
the number of applications that run on Microsoft platforms have been
estimated as high as 35,000. SunOS has an estimated 10,000
applications, with other `commercial UNIX'' systems (including Solaris
2.x) much lower in number. It will take the Linux vendors a long time to
get the number of applications necessary to hit the really large mass
market, particularly if they did not depend on iBCS2 and DOS/Windows
compatibility (which could supply a fair number of current
applications), but depended on ``native'' Linux applications.

So applications are king (and queen) for the mass market, and installed
base (volume) or the promise of explosive growth (volume) is the key to
these. But is the mass market the only ``commercial'' market? The answer
is ``no''. The mass market is a subset (albeit very large one) of the
commercial market. So let's look at what the rest of the commercial
market needs. We will look at this by segmenting the market into:

When I speak of turnkey systems I typically mean a computer system that
has one specific (or not so specific) application that runs on it.
Examples of turnkey systems are point-of-sale terminals, reservation
systems, CAD systems, etc. But in a larger sense, other applications
such as Web servers, nameservers (such as BIND), etc. could also be
considered ``turnkey'', since they have only a few necessary programs that
have to run on the system.

Usually turnkey systems are ones that an Independent Software Vendor
(ISV) or Value Added Reseller (VAR) will chose a hardware system, an
operating system, port an application to it, then duplicate that system
500 to 1000 times without change to the basic application. These ISVs
and VARs will try to chose the lowest cost solution to fit their
customer's needs.

Linux is perfect for these types of applications. The operating system
is stable enough for the developer to port their application and test
the application fully. Once it is fully tested and stable, the entire
package is ``frozen'' and duplicated any number of times for the end
customer.

Since the operating system may be freely copied, and it runs on
inexpensive hardware, their variable costs are minimal. Even a developer
who is not familiar with the Linux system (so they need help getting it
running on a platform) will quickly pay back the porting and system
programmer costs they accrue by not paying $200-$500. per
license for the operating system. Plus they have all the source code for
the entire system, in case they run into trouble later on. You can buy a
lot of Linux support for $200-$500K.

As I said before, I include Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as part of
this ``turnkey'' environment, for both external internet and internal
internet. Why overload your expensive, high-powered, highly complex
general-purpose server to do Web serving when a smaller, simpler box can
offload it? Why not run your NIS slaves on a Linux box? Or perhaps
your BIND server?

In the early days of Digital UNIX (known then as DEC OSF/1) we did not
have very many applications. In fact we had none. The marketing staff
came to me with sad faces asking if it was possible to sell an operating
system that had no applications. I invented a term called
``Turbocharging'', which allowed a Digital UNIX system using the speed and
power of the Alpha processor (as well as the throughput of our
networking devices) to offload NIS, NFS, BIND and other services from
people's overloaded, slower SPARC machines. We also showed people how
they could use the rsh(1) command to allow the Alpha to do a portion
of their very CPU intensive processing while delivering the result back
to the SPARCs on their desk. This allowed the SPARCs to work more on
applications and less on the other ``system administration'' tasks that
they were performing. We sold lots of Digital UNIX systems based solely
on executing those tasks. Today, of course, Digital UNIX has a lot more
applications, and particularly very large memory databases that are
extremely fast. But the same principle applies. The database engine
runs on the Alpha system, supplying data to the slower SPARC engines as
a ``Turbocharger''. I could see Linux systems headed in the same
direction, following the same path.

Very large customers often have their own home-grown applications which
they need to deploy across a wide network of people. Or they can have
management dictate a certain suite of applications, which then can be
ported to Linux. Since these customers are so large, their operating
system costs are huge, and utilizing the savings using the Linux
operating system they may completely cover the expenses of porting their
software.

Or these very large customers may ``influence'' their layered product
providers to port to the Linux platform. Finally, they may even change
some of their computing habits (to use existing programs) if the cost
savings are enough to warrant it.

Companies like Caldera are creating a suite of applications and
approaching these very large customers to show them the operating system
savings that they can achieve if they switch to Linux. While it is true
that every application the customer could ever conceive of running may
not run on Linux, by using the native applications, the iBCS2
applications, the DOSEMU applications, and applications that run under
WABI, a nice suite of applications could be built to solve their needs.

Finally there are what I call ``specialized markets''. Markets that might
buy Linux simply because it is Linux, and not because of the application
suites that it provides.

In the education field there are three main markets:

administrative

``campus computing''

computer science education

The administrative part is the ``business'' aspect of the market. They
are looking for easy-to-use systems that can also handle complex
administrative tasks that might cover a community the size of a small
city.

The ``campus computing'' is the supply of computing power and service for
majors of all types, web services and research into non-computer science
(for example, molecular modeling) research.

Finally there is computer science education, both on the undergraduate
and graduate level, as well as research into computer science.

While the administrative sub-market typically relies more on
shrink-wrapped applications, the other two rely on them to a lesser
extent (with the computer science education market relying the least).
The other two markets can utilize a lot more of the freeware and
shareware applications that are already ported to Linux. This gives
them a very low-cost (from a software perspective) platform while
allowing them to see and (often) modify the source code for the
applications they use.

More importantly, in the computer science research area, the results of
the research can be freely distributed to others working in the field,
or even published as source code to illustrate the results. This can
not be done with ``commercial'' operating systems.

Some universities are utilizing Linux more and more to run their campus.
From a ``commercial'' standpoint, their needs are the same as many large
businesses. Students graduating from college will know about Linux, and
bring the word to their future employers.

Finally, there is the computer hobbyist and software developer market. I
relate this market to the amateur radio market. In the amateur radio
market the radio is often used to simply talk to other people, but at
the same time the users investigate new ways of using radio, and
improving it. Many electrical engineers started out as amateur radio
users. So it can be with Linux, since for the first time both the
prices of the hardware and the prices of the operating system source
code are within the reach of mortal people.

In conclusion, I feel that Linux does have the items needed for several
types of ``commercial'' uses:

stability and quality

low variable costs for turnkey applications

explosive growth in volume to attract ISVs

What Linux really needs is for the ``commercial'' community to understand
what is going on, and to embrace it where it will be useful. This will
increase the volume numbers even more, which will attract more
applications.

Along these lines I would like to ``advertise'' a joint effort of USENIX
and Linux International to happen in January of 1997 in Anaheim,
California of the United States. There will be a joint USENIX/Linux
development conference, and while a certain part of the Linux conference
will be oriented towards the development of the Linux operating system,
the bulk of the conference will be oriented towards application
developers and marketing people, to better understand the Linux
operating system and how to sell their applications and services into
the Linux market. We hope to show ISVs, VARs, resellers and distributors
how they can make money by selling their applications and services on
top of the Linux operating system.

Jon ``maddog'' Hall is a Senior Leader in the Digital Equipment
Corporation UNIX group. He has been in the computer industry for
twenty-five years, UNIX for sixteen years and has guided the emergence
of six operating systems, including Alpha Linux. He has an MS in
Computer Science.